-
Time-shifting suit controls are easy to use and very well integrated into the
game

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The slow-motion and time-shifting special effects are excellent

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Great graphics, challenging level design

-
If you’re not a big shooter fan, this title won’t convert you. It borrows
very effectively from more cohesive recent titles to create a good FPS, but most
of its best innovations involve A.I. and difficulty

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TimeShift

Score:
7.5 / 10

First
person shooters have been enjoying the beginnings of a golden era, for the past
couple of years. Whatever you think about the violence of the genre, it’s hard
to overlook the advances that tactical shooters like the Ghost Recon and Call of
Duty series have made in opponent A.I.; the immersive design and attention to
detail that give the story some real heft in games like Halo and Bioshock; and
the way most of those elements really start to come together in games like Gears
of War.

Now
there’s TimeShift, the new shooter developed by Saber Interactive and
published by Sierra, which certainly deserves a spot somewhere in the ranks of
this next generation of shooters, if more for the challenging, realistic feel of
the AI and level maps than for its somewhat derivative story, environments or
central gimmick.

That
gimmick — a special suit that allows you to slow, stop and even reverse time
— is activated by a tap of the left bumper on the controller. The suit itself
will decide what’s best in a given situation, typically resulting in a Max
Payne,

bullet-time
effect where your character goes on a slow-mo killing frenzy. Pick up and toss
live grenades, disarm opponents and smack them with the butt of their own
rifles, or just plain, old-fashioned, shoot lots of Nazi-esque bad guys,
everything is slightly more awesome in slow motion. The suit controls can be
easily overridden as well, using the face buttons.

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That
ease of use, paired with the suit’s quickly recharging energy meter, means
that players can use these time control features often. And they’ll need to.
There are a handful of simple puzzles that actually require the suit — such as
timed gates that operate much too quickly for players to reach, or exploding
bridges that players must turn back the clock in order to cross. But more than
that, the game just constantly places players in realistic situations with smart
enemies and overwhelmingly terrible odds.

Not
that I’m describing this setting — alate
1930s city, where Dr. Aiden Krone, a mad scientist, has traveled back in time to
become tyrant of a broken, gray metropolis ruled by military force and
retro-futuristic machines that one imagines must have played some role in his
conquest—as “realistic.” It’s a good fictional backstory, rendered in
excellent graphic detail, that lends itself to the fascist, dystopic messages
that Krone drones from giant screens and loudspeakers positioned throughout the
city. Sort of like Half-Life 2.

Instead,
realism here means that almost everything that’s important, such as
checkpoints, is heavily guarded. These areas are often fairly open courtyards
and ruined parks, with narrow points of entry and exit, where trees, shrubs and
fountains don’t make for very good cover. If you’re trying to sneak around
in a drainage ditch, you’re vulnerable, and there are usually a whole lot of
soldiers on bridges and nearby sidewalks that are trying to kill you.

Guards
don’t stick to minor posts when they hear chaos erupting nearby, and if you
are on open ground, they will quickly try to flank and surround you. If you run
and hide behind a door or in a tunnel, they would rather call a couple of
friends over and wait you out than give you any sort of clean shot. And, in a
way that hasn’t been seen in most first person shooters for quite a while,
tanks, turret guns and large groups of soldiers with automatic rifles that want
you dead will all quickly achieve that result, even on the game’s easiest
difficulty setting, if you don’t use your ability to control time.

TimeShift
deserves a sincere recommendation to any hardcore shooter fan on that basis.
It’s an uncompromised look at what it would be like to have the justification
to go behind enemy lines and face entrenched, hostile forces, with an escape
hatch that players can use at will—an escape hatch which treats those same
hardcore fans to plenty of slow-motion ultra-violence. Check it out, that
headshot is making dude do a backflip over nearby shrubbery. Where’s his
helmet? Oh, it’s landing over there.

Basically,
the AI, and the number of enemies in most battles, is comparable to the latest
tactical shooters. But since you’re usually going it alone or sporadically
fighting with a tiny handful of allies — making your ability to slow down time
key to winning most fights—the game makes something of a mashup of the
tactical and first person. You’re one guy doing the work of three here. And
again, I was playing this on the “don’t forget to check your glucose levels,
Captain Novolin” setting.

For
my money though, titles like Gears of War and BioShock are still doing the heavy
lifting in carrying this violent genre, and interactive entertainment in
general, toward respectability. Add the Halo series in there as well, although
the bulk of that franchise’s accomplishments were achieved in its first two
iterations.

Gears
and BioShock are immersive not because they have particularly complex plots or
brilliant dialogue. Easily the most impressive thing about those games was their
environments, which manage to convey a sense of loss — something difficult in
any medium. Everywhere you turn in those worlds are signs that peace, prosperity
and intellect were once there, and something that was beautiful has begun
crumbling beyond repair. Those backdrops leave players constantly asking,
“What was this place, and what led it to this?” around every corner. In both
games, the plot and the dialogue eventually answer a lot of those questions, but
leave plenty of satisfying blanks and dead air for players to fill in with their
own imagination.

TimeShift
shoots for that hoop, but it’s most definitely not an easy shot to make. With
TimeShift, the price of admission gets you a very challenging shooter with a lot
of fantastic special effects and excellent graphics, but not much else.